itwbennett writes: "When working on how to improve the performance of its tool for Android, development tools vendor Xamarin hit a wall because of performance issues with Dalvik, which is Android's virtual machine, according to a post on the company blog. One idea the Xamarin team had was to translate Android's source code to C#. A few months later skunkworks project XobotOS was born. The result of the project's efforts is that most of Android's layouts and controls have been ported to C#, and the code is available on GitHub, according to the blog post."

Posted
by
Soulskill
on Tuesday April 28, 2009 @11:40PM
from the ni-hao dept.

MMOGamer interviewed Andy Schneider, co-founder of Live Gamer, a company working with several major game publishers (including Acclaim, Funcom, and SOE) to legitimize the real money trading (RMT) industry in online games. Schneider expects this method of customer service to grow much more popular in the West over the next few years, especially after the success it's had in Asia.
"It started in the very earliest MMOs, if not back in the MUD days in a very grassroots sort of way, but then obviously got into a more opportunistic and nefarious industry. When I talk about legitimate RMT, it's about a publisher supporting the notion that people want to buy and sell virtual items for real money, and they have decided to proactively support that notion and give their player-base a way to do that. ... It takes the manual process out of the equation that most players are engaged in with the black market, and reduces the fraud considerably, which is good for players. ... The reason there are gold farmers out there, the reason why there is nearly a two billion dollar secondary market for virtual items, is because of consumer demand."